


Advanced Cyber-Security and Living Arrangements

by baviereteam



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:08:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28924086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baviereteam/pseuds/baviereteam
Summary: Rachel goes to California.
Relationships: Abed Nadir/Rachel (Community)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Advanced Cyber-Security and Living Arrangements

**Author's Note:**

> If I get my way with this, there'll be chapters after that first one.  
> If I don't get my way with this, well, don't forget that I love y'all anyway.

EXT. ON THE ROAD, SOMEWHERE BETWEEN COLORADO AND CALIFORNIA.

The sun is about to set, and the road is a long line with no curves, crossing the fields as if it had been drawn with a ruler. This is the middle of Utah, and there is no form of life anywhere, apart from a few cars and the occasional truck driving in one direction or another. One of these cars is a Volkswagen Beetle, which seems to have been green in the past, although it's now greenish-with-paint-losing-color-and-feeling-rusty.

INT. THE CAR

In the car, music by BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN plays on the radio, via a convoluted system that seems to be about plugging a phone into a fake audio cassette that plays in the radio itself, a weird but useful way to connect technology from different centuries. On the passenger side, there is a closed laptop, a messenger bag, and a few papers with highlighted information. The phone itself is held by one of those thingies that pop and un-pop from the windshield. The GPS app shows a straight line for as far as the screen goes - which is consistent with the environment, as there are no other options anyway.

On the back, there is a travel suitcase, which seems to be quite full, a fast-food bag that is apparently used as a trashcan, sorely lacking from the road stops themselves, and a big cardboard box soberly labeled "ABED".

RACHEL is driving the car. She went back to her initial hair color, and still wears the same glasses - or new glasses with the same frame style. She wears a white tee with a pop-rock band logo, black jeans, and green Converse. She's whistling to the tune of the music, and lightly taps her fingers on the wheel in rhythm, occasionally moving her face to check her rear-view mirror.

She left Denver early in the morning, on her way to her first remote assignment, somewhere around Sacramento. It is the first of her work trips, but she knows - or hopes - that it definitely won't be the last. The next ones, however, will be on planes, because that's quicker, paid by the company, and because there's no way the Beetle will survive if she keeps dragging it up and down the country all year long. But this time, she drives - by her own will, and because Sacramento is not that far from LA, and once her mission is done, she's off to visit the city of angels - although, to be fair, some parts of the trip will appeal more to her inner devil.

She smiles, eager to get to spend some time with Abed; she has not seen him since before the summer, a few days after graduation. He left Colorado quickly after the end of the semester as he had gotten that job in LA, while she started working in Denver almost immediately. Not that they saw each other a lot this last semester; their relationship dissolved to a sweet nothing during the previous summer, only to regain traction halfway their last year ("sometimes, it takes a reboot to get it right"), although discretely - Rachel commenting that she'd like to set some distance between herself and the study-group-turned-committee-with-half-of-my-teachers-and-all-of-the-drama in order to actually put up with work (also, the thought of getting close to that teacher who handcuffed her boyfriend really irked her). Still, she reminisces, they kept in touch easily via chat, and they managed to spend enough time together to enjoy cool stuff (that makes her blush slightly).

She should be in Ely, Nevada in 2 hours, assuming there's no traffic jams, but she's optimistic; the road is, for now, so empty that it feels like those scenes in X-Files when Mulder speeds through the desert to find the secret government base with nothing around for miles. According to her research, there's a McDonald's there, and enough motels for her to find a room. Then, it's another day on the road, and she'll be in California, ready to get to work.

She changed her major near the end of her second year. She was initially planning to major in Sociology, and she had taken those additional "computery science" classes early on. She wasn't especially interested in hardware or software, but she decided to get more credits early, and felt like this was knowledge that wouldn't be lost in today's era. But as the course advanced, and as she kept herself up-to-date with the world, she realized that there was something to do that would probably get her some work for the times to come.

And so, she graduated in Social Engineering, a mix between Socialogy and Psychology (Pr. Duncan was actually a good teacher, on the days he was sober enough, and on the years he was actually teaching). She didn't know what the other people who majored in this were destined to do - political strategizing ? Steve Bannon ? protest organizers ? - but she had ideas about what she wanted, and it stood right at the intersection of her major, her comp.sci training : she wanted to work in information security.

Interestingly enough, she was told after the company signed her in, her training in computer science wasn't the part that had made her application interesting. As much as general knowledge in the field was required for the job, she didn't have the level - nor the desire - to do "technical hacking", ie. to find flaws in computer systems and networks to steal information. No, her boss said, they were way more interested in her social engineering major on the paper; but they had really tilted at the mention of her years of Theater Club and her... curating of TVTropes (!), to the point that one of her interviews had turned into some sort of exploration of literature, play or movie clichés. Very useful and quite impressive, the recruiter had said.

And very useful it was indeed: her job was basically to figure out which act to play in order to masquerade herself and steal information. The company assigned her to a multi-competency team of security auditors: they worked together for companies that seeked to test the security of their systems, of their buildings, and of their confidential information. Some of her colleagues were real hackers, who knew all the tips and tricks to find the holes in a network and exfiltrating high-clearance documents while sitting in a car on the parking lot; others were sort of Arsène Lupin, able to enter a secure building and get out with valuable paperwork before anyone even realized they were in; Rachel, on the other side, was tasked with finding the flaws in the human beings. She did not technically break doors or break networks; she "broke" people's trust so that they'd let her in. She talked to workers, analyzed their reactions, finding which of their buttons to press in order to get her way in, and tried to exfiltrate information, or even better, have the information handed to her with a smile and a nice comment. After all, no secure software or encrypted network was worth anything, if you just had to smile to get in the building, and someone printed out all the passwords for you.

The job required a lot of business trips here or there, as the company served customers all over the country, and they were not very stringent about where you worked from, which suited her quite well, with part of her family in Colorado and a boyfriend in California. It was a perfect fit to get her the ability to spend time with Abed without yet being glued to each other all of the time, which meant he'd also get his free space - something that would be more and more important the closer Troy was from coming back.

The music in the car changed to Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945", a quirky soundbite that found itself in that playlist by mistake, but finally stayed there. Rachel yawned, checked the ETA on the GPS, and let her thoughts flow back.

She didn't really know Troy. She knew what he looked like, of course - who wouldn't remember the face of that dude who got into a giant Floor is Lava event, multiple blanket-or-pillow-forts, and an insane number of paintball wars - and knew how much he meant to Abed (she had feared, early on, being nothing but a macguffin to divert him from the void his companion left when he departed to travel the seas), but she herself had yet to spend significant time with him. They had met once in a Skype call meant to be for Abed, but emitted while he was taking a bath, and Abed had told Troy about her (probably not as much as he told her about Troy, but well, their series already had a well-established mythology, so that made sense). She knew, however, that he was bound to return soon, and she hoped that it would be okay.

Not that she was very worried - whether he realized it or not, Troy spinning-off had helped Abed to evolve on his own, spinning-off by himself from Greendale, and getting to live on his own, with his desires and ideals. In some ways, he had even surprised her, occasionally removing himself from the meta lens he usually saw the world through, refusing to analyze the situation like he would usually do. If she had been asked, she'd have said she was proud of him - not that she'd like to say it. It felt too much like being proud of a kid for not acting like a kid. Besides, by focusing a lot on Abed, most people just didn't saw that she had her own flaws, and she disliked that. She was more than a "normal thing" tied to the "not-normal boy", dammit! Why did the whole world have to look at them like that unbalanced couple, while there's actually quite an equilibrium between their own quirks and soft spots? Also, why were all of her thoughts that long? Maybe she'd been driving for too long. Maybe she was hungry. Maybe she just wanted to be on a bed in a motel down the road and take a nap? Or maybe she just wanted to be under the sheets with the warmth of another human being close to her. Maybe it had been too long.

She smirks at the thought. She's on her way, and she's prepared, and somewhere in the bottom of her suitcase is a cheap but nice-looking replica of Uma Thurman's infamous yellow suit from Kill Bill (the first one, obviously), and she really needs to push away all this stuff running in her mind right now because she's driving and it's mildly inconvenient.

A truck passes her, at a speed that, honestly, should be (and might be) illegal for trucks to drive at. She looks in her rear-view mirror and changes the music to something calmer - The Dandy Warhols, but only because it's reachable on the screen without having to scroll while driving. The night has set, and everything is dark - she can only see her car's lights on the road and, already far ahead, the truck's rear lights.

The countryside is empty, but there's mountains now, and it's calm and nothing causes trouble. She hasn't had the occasion to drive much elsewhere than in Colorado, nor has she visited more than 4 of the 50 states; but that will change now, with most of the things in her life, and finally, being 26 in a car on the road in Nevada, with the freedom to go with the flow, that's an exciting thing.

In the horizon, a yellow-ish light appears - probably the public lighting of Ely, the city where she plans to stop at tonight. Her stomach rumbles, calling her to reality, and she aches for warm food and a cheap bed, and yet at that moment, right now, she wouldn't want to trade the experience for anything else.


End file.
